This invention relates to the field of health education, and in particular to an on-line system and method for displaying to a patient a composite of patient-selected entertainment content and personalized educational health content.
The health care community has recognized in recent years the importance of preventive care in managing patients"" health. Preventive care is important for managing the health of patients having chronic diseases or long-term conditions, as well as for reducing the incidence of undesirable behavior (e.g. smoking) in at-risk patients. Preventive care includes educating patients about diseases and/or health consequences of behavior, ensuring communication between patients and health care providers (e.g. doctors), and providing patients with tools and/or treatments for managing diseases or behaviors.
Commonly used preventive care approaches suffer from several drawbacks. Much of preventive care is voluntary, and thus a large fraction of preventive care resources is typically spent on patients who actively seek involvement in their care. A large number of patients do not actively seek information and treatment in the absence of symptoms. Also, health care providers receive very little information on whether patients are complying with preventive care guidelines. Thus, health care providers often are not able to take remedial steps before the disease affects patients symptomatically (e.g. through pain). Reaching passive patients and people at risk for developing medical conditions is critical to delivering effective preventive care.
The mass-marketing techniques used for health education by most health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and insurance companies allow little customization of information to an individual patient""s needs. Consequently, many patients may not directly identify with the educational approaches used by their health care providers. Personalizing health education would significantly raise the effectiveness of preventive health care, especially in children and adolescents.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,542,420, Goldman et al. describe a system for prescribing personalized diets to individual patients. Health profiles of the patients are used to generate the personalized diets. The system described by Goldman et al. requires patient initiative in the prescription process.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,140,419, Galumbeck et al. describe a multiple-hierarchical data delivery system capable of addressing receivers singly or in groups. The Galumbeck et al. patent does not discuss health education issues. Other related to selective addressing of receivers include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,565,909 and 5,432,542 by Thibadeau et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,924 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,925 by Freeman et al.
None of the above-mentioned disclosures provides a system or method capable of delivering personalized health information to a patient, without requiring an express request for the information by the patient.
Accordingly, it is a primary object of the present invention to provide a system and method for delivering personalized health content to a patient, without requiring specific patient requests for the health content. The system allows delivering personalized health content in the course of normal recreational activities of the patient. Personalizing the health content improves the educational effectiveness of the method. The system allows the use, without substantial modification, of pre-existing spatial or temporal layouts of entertainment programming. The use of a dedicated server for data processing and storage allows a reduction in the amount of data transferred over relatively low-bandwidth communication lines to patients"" homes.
A system for delivering personalized health information comprises a source of personalized health content, a source of entertainment content, a composing means in communication with the sources of entertainment and personalized health content, and a display means in communication with the composing means The composing means generates a composite of entertainment content and personalized health content. The display means generates a display of the composite.
The source of entertainment content is in communication with a content request means for allowing the patient to expressly request specific entertainment content, i.e. to xe2x80x9cpullxe2x80x9d content from the source of entertainment content. The entertainment content is delivered to the composing means following an express patient request for the entertainment content
The source of personalized health content comprises a health content selection means in communication with a set of inputs. The health content selection means generates the personalized health content according to data from the set of inputs. The set of inputs comprises a general health content base and inputs allowing the selection of content from the general health content base. Inputs used for content selection include a medical treatment regimen, a health profile, an educational treatment plan, a psychological profile, and a content history of the patient. A treatment plan means generates the educational treatment plan from the treatment regimen and health profile of the patient.
The medical treatment regimen specifies target health parameters, while the health profile specifies actual health parameters of the patient. The treatment plan is generated by comparing the target parameters to the actual parameters. The treatment plan specifies educational goal parameters of the patient. The educational goal parenters measure the importance of corresponding educational goals for the particular patient. The psychological profile comprises data characterizing likes, dislikes, and motivators of the patient. The content history identifies the health content to which the patient has been exposed within a given time period.
The composing means generates the composite according to a patient criticality. The patient criticality measures the patient""s compliance with the treatment regimen. A criticality means generates the patient criticality by comparing the treatment regimen and the health profile.
The composite is preferably a spatial composite. That is, the composite comprises a composite page including both entertainment and health content. The composite page comprises an entertainment section comprising the entertainment content and a health section comprising the health content. The source of entertainment content generates an original page comprising an entertainment section and an undesirable section (e.g. an advertisement). The composing means replaces the undesirable section with a health section, thereby generating the composite page. The page layout of the composite page is substantially identical to the page layout of the original page. A spatial composite preferably comprises a hypertext markup language (HTML) document.
In an alternative embodiment suited for television health education, the composite is a temporal composite. The display of the composite then comprises an image sequence comprising a first image and a second image, wherein the first image comprises the entertainment content and the second image comprises the health content. The first image consists substantially of the entertainment content, while the second image consists substantially of the health content.
The system comprises a client subsystem comprising the display means, and a server subsystem in communication with the client, subsystem over a remote network. The display means preferably comprises a television set and a multimedia processor. Suitable remote networks include the Internet and communications lines used for cable television delivery. The server subsystem preferably comprises the composing means and the entertainment and health content sources. The server subsystem, and in particular the source of health content, is in communication with a plurality of client subsystems, where each client subsystem corresponds to a different patient, and where data is customized (personalized) independently for each client subsystem.
The present invention further provides a method of delivering health information to a patient. The method comprises the steps of generating the composite of personalized health content and patient-requested entertainment content, and displaying the composite to the patient.